Snakes and Livers

Since we've gotten to Ganiyari, we have not gone anywhere else... in the past two weeks we haven't gone farther away from our room than the village center less than 1km away.

I went into Bilaspur last night with one of the lab attendants. We went on a motorcycle. Everybody here knows how to ride a motorcycle, and are surprised that we don't. We explained that in the US highway traffic goes at well over 100km, and the motorcycles are bigger and more powerful, so people think you are crazy and want to die if you ride one. Here they probably don't go much faster than 40km, and are much cheaper and more available than cars. Several people have offered to teach us, and I intend to learn, as it is a useful way to be able to get around.

We rode in and we dropped off some blood samples, and then some body parts for biopsy. He had a plastic shopping bag, and inside he pulled out 3 bags, each with bits of human tissue in them. Two were small and white/pale yellow and looked like chunks of fat, and one was huge and reddish brown and looked like a liver. We went and got a cup of tea while they generated some reports, which we took back to the clinic with us.

The other night there was a poisonous snake, a banded krait, at the foot of our building. We took some pictures, then went to dinner. When we came back we they had killed it. I had though that this was the local standard procedure with such snakes, but one of the doctors was upset they had killed it. He said it didn't help at all with snakebites, as there were likely many more we hadn't seen.

We also saw a family of monkeys on the way to the market last week. The were hanging out on a temple fence. People were throwing things at them and yelling at them as they walked by. We saw a dog chase one across a field. The monkeys are great jumpers, but also troublemakers, I guess, which is why people try to chase them off. It was a mostly futile effort, as the monkeys are very quick.